For the first half of this book, I was entirely unimpressed with the book. I did not like the characters. I was horrified by the whole premise where the addict kills his kid when he drives drunk on morning. I hated how the author played with emotion, making me simultaneously hate the guy, but also eel so sorry for him and his situation.  The relationship with his wife, his mother, his father, and his mother-in-law, all portrayed with raw pain and in the first act, this just felt like a poor attempt to manipulate the reader.

But, about half-way through the book, everything shifted for me. I had no idea what was coming, so I didn't know what I was getting into.  I think is is probably why I ended really liking this book a lot.  I want to preserve that for you if you are going to read it, so spoiler alerts ahead here...

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!


This is essentially a book about the need for prison reform.  It is absolutely heartbreaking to experience the incarceration of an addict whose trauma is killing him.  The brutality of prison, the lack of services, the sexual abuse, the psychological torture, all of it was raw and complicated.  This unlikeable guy, who killed his kid, who lied to his wife, who is passive aggressive and narcissistic, and who lacks significant insight into his psyche doesn't deserve what happens to him in prison--no one would.  There are moments of joy and connection, but those are outweighed by layers and layers of pain, bad luck that just compounds and is heartbreaking -- up to the end when COVID hits the prison.  

END SPOILER ALERT??

Sad from start to finish, this is worth reading for the thought-provoking analysis of the criminal responsibility in an era of retribution.

​Recommend.

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At its core, this is a ghost story, a violent, horrifying ghost story about the kids banished to a reformatory for committing petty mostly pretty crimes.  The main character, a young Black boy incarcerated in a reformatory school for defending himself in a fight. Everything about this book is dark, graphic, and depressing, except maybe the very end, but by then it was too late for me to appreciate that.  I don't like horror or graphic violence, so this was just not for me at all. 

I suppose I wish I were the kind of person who could tolerate this level of historically accurate misery better, but even with what could be considered an empowering ending, I just couldn't get a lot of the terrorizing scenes out of my mind and while that might have been justified by the context of the story or even the point of the book, the gore and horror of it was too much. 

Do not recommend.
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Written from the perspective of a young girl born to a Danish mother and deployed American serviceman, the story unfolds as the narrator lands in Portland, Oregon, in the 1980s to live with her father's mother and sister.  So much nuance here as she discovers what it means to be Black in the US, first living with her parents in Chicago and then living in Portland.  From the beginning, it is obvious that she has experienced a trauma. Her mother is dead, her father is absent, and she spent a long stint in the hospital. 

As the story unfolds, we learn snippets of her past, as she grows up an outsider living with her grandmother, not Black enough or white enough, her quest to find her place is a beautiful coming of age story and neatly demonstrates how little trauma was understood in the 80's.

​recommend.
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Often when a book gets this much hype, I find it doesn't live up, but Reid came through again and I loved this book.  I was completely sucked in, stayed up much to late to finish it. In fact, 4 minutes from the end, which was a thrilling ending, my phone ran out of battery and I was left in wicked suspense while I recharged it in the middle of the night to find out what happened. 

This book is like The Hidden Figures meets Erich Segal's Love Story meets Lessons in Chemistry. The backdrop of working at NASA in the 1980's sets the stage for a relatively nuanced portrayal of the many ways that women adjusted to make their way in that workforce.  I loved the character development, the love story, the family relationships, and the way in which the plot unfolded with flashbacks. I often do not like when a book starts with a harrowing scene and then leaves you hanging while it backs up to fill in what is happening, but this book used that structure better than almost any book I can remember and it kept me engaged, not just in the that scene unfolding, but in the back stories as well. I can definitely see why so many people thought this was their favorite book of 2025 and, for once, I am going to join the crowd on this one.  

What a great start to my reading year!

​Recommend.

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This is a sequel to My Name is Lucy Burton, which I read as part of my 2017 reading challenge. That was a year when I had categories of books that I was reading from and I can't remember which category this fulfilled.  I had trouble finding books to fill those lists the few years that I did that and started asking for recommendations, which is how I ended up ditching that list and just taking recommendations for my yearly booklist. 
In any event, I did not write reviews back then, so I decided to reread My Name Is Lucy Barton after reading the first chapter of this book in order to remember the backstory.  In retrospect, this wasn't necessary to appreciate this story, but it did help connect many of the relationships in the book.
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And there are a lot of relationships in this book.  There are a ton of characters and the history between them is complicated. I often felt like I do when I visit friends in a close-knit community or try to join a new group of people who have been tight for a long time.  There are all these backstories that touch on each other and it is hard to keep up with how they all touch on each other.  This makes the details of the book hard to keep track of and sometimes I would be well into a new storyline before I realized these were the same people from another storyline. In many ways, this is the magic of this series. It really makes you feel what Lucy Barton's small town life with judgy, hurtful people was like--and not just for her.  Those who bullied her, those who were indifferent to her, and those who saw and helped her in big and small ways are all portrayed sometimes in sympathetic ways, sometimes not, and most often in both ways at the same time. 

There is so much depth here, so much hurt. Child sex abuse and sexual assault play prominent roles as they play out in families and relationships in ways that fill in the backstory for many characters. It is the story of kids who were bullied and kids who did the bullying and kids who were both bullied and did the bullying and how this plays out in their adult lives.  The emotion of childhood trauma, indeed sometimes of torture, is on painful display here--told with a perspective that conveys deep empathy for the damage done and the damage done to the people caused the damage.  It is heart-wrenching the whole way.

Recommend.

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I will preface this by saying that I am not a fan of horror, either in books or movies, but part of this project is that I read and finish every book and in this case, even though the bottom line is going to be a Not Recommended label, I have to say that I thought and talked about this book a remarkable amount for not recommending it to anyone. 

This book is about truly awful, abusive mothers with borderline personality disorders who torture and haunt their children, even after their death.  The lack of clarity about whether the haunting is real or a shared delusion as a result of the trauma these mothers inflicted on their children, step-children, and children-in-law, is truly horrifying and the book in general was, indeed, horrific. 

That said, the ending was so clever and the cleverness of the ending only adding to the horror of the story.  Although it is a full book, it had the pacing and feel more in line with that of a short story, including the way the ending of the story lands with the slow realization of what is happening having the feel of The Gift of the Magi or The Lottery. 

If you are a fan of horror, then this may very well be for you, but I can't really recommend it otherwise. I did give serious thought to a Not Not Recommendation, but ultimately decided that it really was just too disturbing for that.

Not recommended.

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Set in the 1700s, this historical fiction is set in the extremely remote St. Kilda on the island of Hirta in an isolated and rugged region of northwest Scotland.  The story takes place when a boat trip full of boy and a few men go hunting for a particularly coveted type of bird as part of an annual tradition.  They get stranded on what seems to be a small rock formation in the sea.  The dozen or so men and boys are hungry, cold, and homesick--left with virtually no resources whatsoever. 

As if the isolation, cold, and hunger weren't enough to endure, the fake preacher does serious harm as he tries to control the boys with fear mongering and shame, which is especially heartbreaking as the younger boys, who are maybe 9 or 10, are tormented by the separation from their homes and starting to lose hope of rescue.  His approach to imposing confession and attributing sin to the children is horrifying, especially when he insists on everyone shunning one of the children for seven days by not talking to him at all.  He also tells the youngest child that when they run out of birds to eat, they will start eating the youngest kids first.  The brutality of the story just keeps coming in waves, without the kind of breaks for meaning or connection that I would have wanted to see.

The story is reminiscent of Lord of The Flies in that it is a group of boys stranded on an island, but this is a significantly better book than that one. This is dark in a different way, as the adults do nothing to mitigate the stress for the children.

There is also a weird side story about one of the children whose mother has been secretly raising her as a boy because she was afraid to tell the child's father that she wasn't a boy when she was born. This fact becomes evidence while they are marooned and the whole way it is handled is just odd.  I have to think it isn't possible to know how that would have been handled in the 1770's, but the way the book portrays it just felt off.

Apparently loosely based on a true story, the ending is especially depressing.  I am pretty surprised it is classified as a children's book, too.

Do not recommend.

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It will come as no surprise that this is not a light read, but this reflection on antisemitism is both interesting and informative. I particularly appreciated how it is gives context to some of the commentary that I commonly hear from Jewish friends and read by Jewish authors. One thing that stood out to me in particular is the way in which many  progressive Pro-Palestine movements' boycotts of Israeli companies is perceived as antisemitic even as many leaders of those boycotts reiterate that they distinguish between the State of Israel and Jewish people.  The explanation in this book is really compelling and also reminds us how close in time we are to the time before the Holocaust when Germans were encouraged not to buy from Jewish stores. Her writing is both so well researched and so emotionally compelling that I found myself leaving each section with more compassion for and understanding of why somethings are perceived as antisemitic even when non-Jews might resist that description. 

It took me a while to finish this book, so was reading it about six weeks ago when the lethal bombing attack at the protest in Boulder occurred and I was impressed by how it shifted how much it impacted how I thought about the aftermath of that incident.  The core idea in the book that hate crimes against Jews are only given attention to the extent that the narrative can be used for a purpose that distracts from the horror of antisemitic violence to the benefit of others played out in real time as I was watching.  Almost as soon as the news broke, the immigrant accused of the bombing was arrested and charged, but rather than using the moment to focus on hate crimes and violence, the federal government arrested and deported his  wife and children, bypassing due process, thus shifting the focus from his Jewish victims and instead to using the event for political gain just in exactly the manner the book describes.  You have to love when a book provides such relevant insight and analysis even it was published a few years ago.

Recommend.

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A Holocaust novel, this book reminded me so much of the more well-known novel The Book Thief that I actually had to make sure that I wasn't misremembering that it was the same book--or at least the same author.  While The Book Thief was narrated by Death, The Little Liar was narrated by Truth.  The story is, of course, both incredibly depressing while also being a story of resilience for those who survived and it does a good job of highlighting the different ways the characters survived and what it cost them. I found the respect for the disparate impacts of trauma on different people to be relatively sophisticate and interesting. Some of the plot twists felt farfetched and the over-done theme of the non-Jews who, out of no where, stepped in to help was trite. The use of Truth as the narrator felt a bit gimmicky.  I had some sympathy for this, since it must be difficult to find a fresh way to engage with material this dark that will find an audience and yet I just found the narration scheme to be distracting.  I am likely in the minority in this respect, though, since I had a similar reaction to The Book Thief.  
 
Not recommended. 
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This was an incredibly painful book to read about the author's struggle with is son's addiction. 
How many rock bottoms can one family survive?  The writing is elegant and the author's love for his child permeates every word as he begins his decent into addiction, struggling with recovery and relapse. The book is a heartache from beginning to end, told from the perspective of a parent desperate to help, but powerless over their child's choices, but also over his own drive to provide comfort and protection for an addict caught in the narcissism and criminality of active addiction. Prepare to have your heart broken, over and over, and make sure you have the pace to reflect on everyone you ever loved who has known addiction. 

I also want to point out that this book also alludes to the unpopular and often ignored topic of how bad parenting plans impact the children who have to live them out--a very real reminder for separated parents and the professionals so write those plans for them.

Recommend.
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